ALM: User Guide

This is a convenient way to control progress on the work against several parameters at once:

• card color can indicate the importance of a task or its type;
• vertical columns show progress on a task or requirement;
• rows can group cards by team, assignee, due date, priority, release, iteration, and so on.

In each standard process we have prepared several standard boards, which you can adapt to your own tasks and save as a separate module with all of these settings.

There are two main development workflows:

• Sequential (Kanban, Waterfall), in which each requirement (or group of requirements) passes through every stage in order, from design through documentation, and at each stage the project team members do their part of the work.
• Parallel (Scrum, Scrumban), in which work on a requirement is broken into tasks for each participant. Tasks can be done sequentially or in parallel. The requirement does not move to the next production stage until every task for it is done.

When managing the work, we therefore track:

1. progress on user requirements, using the request board or the story board;
2. and, when work on a user requirement is parallel, the task board as well, which shows progress on the tasks for those requirements.

In a sequential process, requirement implementation is shown as stages (columns on the board) that reflect your development process. At any one time a requirement can be in only one stage, for example analysis or testing. When the next stage is passed, for example when detailed system requirements have been prepared, the original primary requirement moves to the next stage, and so on. An example of this scheme is the "Product support" process, which is based on Kanban.

Sequential processes are not always convenient. Many software development tasks can be done in parallel, for example design, development, and preparation of test documentation. High task complexity can send them back to earlier stages when the assignee has already started the next task. In that situation it is more convenient to let the team decide the amount of assigned work and the order in which it is done. This is achieved by breaking a requirement into tasks. The "Product discovery" and "Product development" processes are examples of this scheme.

Limits